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Clothing & Accessories

Work, play, fashion, economic class, religious faith, even politics—all these aspects of American life and more are woven into clothing. The Museum cares for one of the nation's foremost collections of men's, women's, and children's garments and accessories—from wedding gowns and military uniforms to Halloween costumes and bathing suits.

The collections include work uniforms, academic gowns, clothing of presidents and first ladies, T-shirts bearing protest slogans, and a clean-room "bunny suit" from a manufacturer of computer microchips. Beyond garments, the collections encompass jewelry, handbags, hair dryers, dress forms, hatboxes, suitcases, salesmen's samples, and thousands of fashion prints, photographs, and original illustrations. The more than 30,000 artifacts here represent the changing appearance of Americans from the 1700s to the present day.

While leg makeup has been commercially available since the 1920s, it wasn't until rationing was introduced during the World War II that the product became an essential commodity for many American women. Unable to procure silk or nylon hose, many women resorted to painting their legs with products such as Leg Silque Liquid Stockings, made in Boston, Mass., by the Langlors Company. Some industrious users even drew black lines down the backs of their legs to simulate the seams.

Most Americans learned about digital electronic watches for the first time when the Pulsar came on the market in 1972.

The Pulsar originated in a watch built by George Thiess and colleagues at ElectroData, a small electronics firm in Garland, Texas, and developed into a marketable piece of fine jewelry when ElectroData partnered with a division of the Hamilton Watch Co. of Lancaster, Pa. The watch had no moving parts. It was huge, showy and expensive. With a price tag of $2100, the Pulsar cost about as much as a small car at that time.

Hamilton marketed the watch as "a time computer." The display was composed of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that consumed so much power that the watch couldn't display the time continuously. Instead, the wearer had to push a button to illuminate the time. Pressing the button briefly displayed the hour and minute. Holding the button down a little longer showed the seconds. To set the watch required a small magnet stored in the watchband's clasp.

For these inconveniences, Pulsar's proud owner got the most accurate time then available in a wristwatch. The new quartz technology inside made the watch accurate to within a minute a year, compared to about 15 seconds a day for the best mechanical watch.

The wristwatch was completely reinvented with all-new electronic components beginning in the 1960s. For centuries before then, watches had been mechanical--composed of intricate moving parts powered by an unwinding spring. When battery-driven quartz wristwatches first hit the market, it seemed unlikely that the new-fangled gadgets would sell. But electronic watches won over the buying public.

Today, mechanical watches make up only approximately 10% of the world watch market. The components for the quartz watch emerged from independent streams of invention that stretched over nearly a century. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries scientists identified new materials like liquid crystals and discovered unknown properties such as piezoelectricity, the ability of certain crystals to produce electrical voltage when pressed mechanically. During the Cold war, researchers in defense and aerospace technologies laid the basis for miniaturizing electronic circuitry. In the 1960s, enterprising manufacturers applied the new research to the first electronic consumer products—tvs, calculators, hearing aids, and watches.

Dating from the 18th century, these metal shoes were made for and worn by a chemist. The donor is purported to have purchased these from a direct descendant of the famous French chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, and the shoes were supposedly worn by Lavoisier. However, there is no way to verify this claim, so we value these shoes for what they can tell us about early French scientific and cultural history.

They are made of cast iron; each shoe weighs over 1-1/2 lbs! The shoes slip on. There are rivets all around the top of the heels, sides, and insteps. On one shoe, some remnants of leather remain under the rivets. Whether this leather was strictly decorative or served some practical purpose is unknown.

This evening dress, made of yellow-green silk satin, with princess-style seams, has a very full skirt, measuring 409-1/2 inches around the hem edge. The gown's pleated portrait collar and short sleeves were cut all-in-one with the upper bodice panel. A separate self-fabric belt with rhinestone buckle encircles the waist. A "Hattie Carnegie Original" designer's label is sewn on an inside skirt seam.

Hattie Carnegie, one of a few female entrepreneurs in the early to mid-20th century, was born Henrietta Kanengeiser in Vienna, Austria, in 1886. She came to the United States in 1892. Her first job was as a messenger, sometime milliner, and model in Macy's department store. She decided to change her name and chose the surname of the richest man in the country, Andrew Carnegie, to reflect her ambitions. With determination and an innate sense for style and business, she became a symbol of taste and high fashion to many Americans.

From the very beginning her wholesale and retail establishments attracted the wealthy. She opened her first shop, "Carnegie—Ladies' Hatter" in 1909, making and selling custom-made dresses and hats. As her business grew, she established her own wholesale house, which manufactured clothing with her label and sold in select stores. Well-known designers such as Claire McCardell and Norman Norell began their careers designing for her. By 1945, her shop on 49th Street in New York had added more departments, including American and French designs and accessories for "smart" dressing.

This dress was worn by the donor, Mrs. Morehead Patterson, nee Margaret Tilt, the daughter of Charles A. Tilt of Chicago's Diamond T. Motor Car. She was at one time married to Moorehead Patterson, CEO of the American Foundry Machine Company (AMF), New York City.

The donor purchased this navy-blue wool double-breasted two-piece suit on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in early 1945. He wore it for his 1945 high school class picture and graduation ceremony in Los Angeles, California. He continued to wear the suit until he entered the navy in July of 1945. The May 1945 issue of Esquire magazine featured a similar suit, claiming that jackets with buttons set low were accepted by men conscious of the subtleties of fashion. They also noted that a double-breasted jacket with low buttons and long lapels accentuated the height of the wearer.

While not every man owned a suit in pre-Civil War America, the development of the ready-to-wear industry in the United States made the purchase of a suit possible for most men by the end of the 19th century. The availability of ready-made suits at a reasonable price was helped by the shift from the more formal frock coat and trousers of the 19th century to the more relaxed fit of the sack coat. It is the sack suit or lounge suit, a business suit made of wool with a loose fitting single or double-breasted jacket that dominated men's fashion throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

These mittens were knitted of blue and white homespun wools in the early 19th century. The shag knit used at the wrists is recorded in an American diary of 1803 as the "new Mode of Knitting." The knitted pattern throughout the mittens is a poem that starts at the wrist of one mitten, spirals to the top, and continues from the wrist to the top of the second. The "Xs" are part of the design and are used as line delimiters. The poem reads, "One thing you must not borrow nor never give awayXFor he who borrows trouble will have it every dayXBut if you have a plenty and more then you can bearXIt will not lighten yoursXXif others have a shareXYou must learn to be contented then will your trouble ceaseXAnd then you may be certain that you will live in peaceXFor a contented mind is a continual feast."

The thumb of each mitten is adorned with the name "William Watson." A printer of cheap or penny papers named William Watson was active in London from about 1805 to 1830. Each of his publications contained a woodcut, a story, and a poem. The Library of Congress has only one example of his papers, but its poem is of comparable length, and of the same moralizing quality as the mittens' poem, offering a direction for further research.

In No Idle Hands, The Social History of American Knitting (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), Anne L. Macdonald pictures a single mitten patterned with half of the same poem. An undated newspaper clipping attributes it to Margaret Evans of New Hampshire, possibly 18th century. The thumb of the Evans mitten appears to say, "Son 4 U Mother" and "80." At the beginning of the poem of this pair of mittens, there are two initials or numbers, perhaps "OB" or "DB" or "08" or "80." Patterns for short inscriptions and dates in knitting were published from at least the late 18th century.

During the Civil War Army physician Dr. G. D. O'Farrell received this watch as a gift from grateful patients.

In the 1850s watchmakers at what would become the American Watch Company of Waltham, Massachusetts, developed the world's first machine-made watches. They completely redesigned the watch so that its movement could be assembled from interchangeable parts made on specialized machines invented just for that purpose. They also developed a highly organized factory-based work system to speed production and cut costs.

In its first decade, the firm's work was largely experimental and the firm's finances were unsteady. The name of the company changed repeatedly as investors came and went. Operations moved from Roxbury to Waltham in 1854, and the Panic of 1857 brought bankruptcy and a new owner, Royal Robbins. Reorganization and recovery began, and output reached fourteen thousand watches in 1858.

Renamed the American Watch Company the next year, the firm was on the brink of success from an unexpected quarter. During the Civil War, Waltham's watch factory designed and mass-produced a low-cost watch, the William Ellery model. Selling for an unbelievable $13.00, these watches became a fad with Union soldiers. Just as itinerant peddlers had aroused the desire for inexpensive clocks, roving merchants sold thousands of cheap watches to eager customers in wartime encampments. By 1865, the year the war ended, William Ellery movements represented almost 45 per cent of Waltham's unit sales.

This William Ellery model watch was a gift to Army surgeon G. D. O'Farrell from his patients at White Hall, a Civil War hospital near Philadelphia. The inscription on the dust cover of O'Farrell's watch reads: "White Hall USA Gen'l Hospital, Feb. 15, 1865 Presented to Dr. G. D. O'Farrell, USA by the patients of Ward C as a token of regard & respect for his ability as a surgeon and unswerving integrity as a man."

This watch belonged to Sir Sandford Fleming, chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway. About 1880, Fleming devised a plan for worldwide time zones and had a complicated watch made to reflect both zoned time and local time.

The maker of Fleming's watch is the London firm of Nicole, Nielsen & Co. Successor to a business founded by Swiss immigrants Adolphe Nicole and Jules Capt in the late 1830s, the firm made high-quality timepieces. Fleming ordered the watch through retailer E. White, also of London.

Fleming's first notions about time reform emerged on a trip to Ireland in 1876, when he missed a train because he misread a timetable. His initial plan concentrated on replacing the two twelve-hour designations of the day, A.M. and P.M., with a twenty-four hour system. Almost immediately, though, he expanded his ideas about time reform to propose a system he called variously "Terrestrial Time," "Cosmopolitan Time," and "Cosmic Time"-a division of the globe into twenty-four zones, each one hour apart and identified by letters of the alphabet.

As the 1880s began there was no binding international agreement about how to keep time for the world. Traditionally, each country used its own capital city or main observatory for measuring time and designating lines of longitude on national maps. After publication of the British Nautical Almanac began in 1767, many nations came to use Greenwich time for navigation and some scientific observations. Local mean time served for all other activities.

Added emphasis on Greenwich had come from North America when the railroads there voluntarily adopted a standard zoned time in 1883. In that system, the zones were based on meridians counted west from Greenwich, England, at zero degree of longitude.

Fleming was not the first or only proponent of world standard time. Quirico Filopanti, an Italian mathematics and engineering professor, for example, published a scheme based on twenty-four zones counted from Rome as prime meridian in 1858.

Organized international support emerged slowly for fixing a common prime meridian. Not until October 1884 did diplomats and technical specialists gather to act on scientific proposals. The International Meridian Conference, held in Washington, DC, recommended that the nations of the world establish a prime meridian at Greenwich, count longitude east and west from the prime meridian up to 180 degrees in each direction, and adopt a universal day beginning at Greenwich at midnight. Although the International Meridian Conference had no authority to enforce its suggestions, the meeting resulted in the gradual worldwide adoption of a time-zone based system with Greenwich as zero degrees.

The military and some civilian science, aviation and navigation efforts still use alphabet identifiers for time zones. The time of day in Zone Z is known as "Zulu Time." The zone is governed by the zero degree of longitude that runs through Greenwich.